Building the system pt. 2

The difficult part of working in small theater video projection is that you have to be a software and hardware person. You're analogous to the lighting designer who, besides designing lighting, is up there on tall ladders hanging lights. On most of the previous shows I've worked on, I've had to use my feminine wiles to get someone to do that stuff for me. That's one of the reasons I stopped working on shows for awhile. I have no idea how to hang projectors from the ceiling. Remember, I'm the person who tried to mount a 500 watt light for my movie using string (which promptly burned off). I also set a sheet on fire by putting my bed sheet scrim too close to a light. Cabling, fine. Mounting hardware, no.

So it's not surprising that the way I addressed the system problem was to turn back to software. Most show running software requires fast computers. But I was hoping to use two of the spare old G4s we had in the art department. So I turned to revMedia. revMedia is the free version of a suite of products including revStudio, and revEnterprise. revMedia is a clone of HyperCard, a high level programming language written by Bill Atkinson for the Mac over twenty years ago. I feel very comfortable with the syntax, like it's a second language. Not only is revMedia free, it's cross platform so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. Plus, it's not a resource hog. I've used it on a couple of small projects in the past few years.

It took about four hours to get a working system going. Everything is cued by the keyboard. You press 1 on the keyboard, video cue 1 pops up. You want to fade something out you press 0. Press return to pause/unpause. It works great I think. Still waiting for the show report. But in rehearsal it went fine. There's still no dowser/curtain on the monitors so we're working without a net. But at least we're working on a Mac system in which it's easier to control error messages. Plus on revMedia, you can lock out application-specific error dialogs. Break a leg.